Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Street Names and Private-Public Violence in Modern French Crime Fiction

Abstract

Andrea Goulet is associate professor in the Department of French and in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (2006) and coeditor of a special issue of Yale French Studies, “Crime Fictions” (2005).

Watching the Detectives

“…Of course, these three detective programmes are not alone in this: the placespecific quality appears to be a common feature of the detective genre (Cavender, 1998: 87-90;McManis, 1978: 320). In fact, the first detective story ever, written by Edgar Allen Poe in 1841, was based on a 'Parisian' (though fictional) street name: Murders in the Rue Morgue (Goulet, 2007).…”

“…In fact, the first detective story ever, written by Edgar Allen Poe in 1841, was based on a 'Parisian' (though fictional) street name: Murders in the Rue Morgue (Goulet, 2007).…”